Zeyar Lynn's second show on Close Listening, in which he reads his poems, in both Burmese and English, from Bones Will Crow, ed. James Byrne and ko ko thett (Northern Illinois University Press, 2013) -- the new anthology of Burmese poetry. He also discusses his work, the situation for poetry in Myanmar, and his influences with host Charles Bernstein. Zeyar Lynn reads "My History Is Not Mine" (first in Burmese then in English), "The Way of the Beards" (English/Burmese), "Slide Show" (English/Burmese) and "Sling Bag" (English/Burmese).

It’s virtually the centennial of Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo (1912, published 1914). But the poem has gone through hard times. Despite its enormous initial popularity, Lindsay’s poem has become an embarrassment. Its overt racist imagery has put it under erasure: little taught and little anthologized. Still, a recitation of the poem appears, without any indication of the controversy, in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. And Lindsay is surely a precursor to a range of performance poetry. PennSound made available a recording of Lindsay reading the poem on our Lindsay page. The Library of America includes the poem in volume one of their great anthology of modernist American poetry (see my 2000 conversation with LOA editor Geoffrey O’Brien). Al Filreis recorded a Poem Talk on the poem — with A.L. Nielsen, Michelle Taransky, and me. Our interest is not to put a happy spin on the poem but rather to see what the poem can tell us about American racsim, including the racism of a poet of the left like Lindsay, who was far more supportive of the rigths of African-Americans than most of his contemporaries.

this just in from James Sherry ––Since 1978 our iconic series, started by Ted Greenwald and Charles Bernstein, has presented innovative writers from around the world. Do come to the Zinc Bar Saturdays from 4:30-6:30 starting October 5, 2013. We look forward to hosting the best new writers and to seeing you there.

“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions." – Jerome Rothenberg on The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein.

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”—George Lakoff

Robert Creeley: "Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material." ––"Help Is on the Way" in The American Book Review (Vol.14, No. 6, 1993), p. 18.